In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:
The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).
It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.
I agree about the bubble effect. I feel it, too, even though I don’t consider myself in a bubble. I truly am enjoying Lemmy and the conversations more than anything else even somewhat similar to it. The smallish nature of the community probably combined with the slightly elevated bar for joining means the riff raff isn’t here in large numbers yet.
Lemmy, today, honestly reminds me of Reddit 15 years ago.
Perhaps this is the bubble effect, but I have a high confidence level in the major third party devs being able to streamline the sign up process. It is already happening in some apps.
The stability problems are another story. I encourage people to go to the front page of their respective communities and look for donation links. Even $1/mo on Patreon can snowball into large sums as Lemmy.World shows.
I agree, but I’m also optimistic because the glitchiness, server performance, and user interface issues are all things that can be fixed in the future.
Agreed with the second part. I think the federated servers are a neat concept, but at the end of the day what made reddit easier was that everything was on one server. You create an account and that’s it, you can browse every subreddit.
I hope it’ll grow more, but rnow I think they should work on making the whole experience more seamless
I feel like there should be a button of “hey you want me to handle this for you and pick an instance” I managed to figure out the basics and liked the post office example that memmy uses where I can mail a letter to my fellow lemm.ee friends down the street but can also get mail and news from across the country. Helpful admins are also good. I’m not super duper tech literate but I figured it out.
Like I said reducing barriers to entry will be helpful because I didn’t come here till Apollo kicked the bucket
Just my opinion but that ease of use will come in time. The more the learning curve exists the more we will get the power users that made Reddit special and the more Lemmy will stay special.
I don’t want the Reddit of today on Lemmy. I want the Reddit 10 years ago when there was a fraction of the users on it.
We are doomed to ultimately have the same struggles that read it ended up with in terms of content and users but we can keep it held off as long as possible.
I disagree with you, yes, ease of use will come for power users, but in the end it’s the diversity of people interacting with the platform that creates communities with valuable content. And to attract more people the platform needs less friction at on-boarding.
In their current state, definitely not. There is a real bubble effect browsing on Lemmy because it feels like 1 post out of 3 is just praising the platform, but I think they’re far from ready to become mainstream. I’d say there are for now 2 major problems:
The global instability (a lot of bugs, many third party apps, but a poor on-boarding with the main website).
It was made by engineers and marketed by engineers. The federated aspect should IMO be public and known, but seamless. It should be possible to just create an account and start browsing without having to do some research on how the thing works. The technical aspect of the fediverse is great, but it’s also its main drawback, I believe that hiding it for newcomers could be a way of not scaring them.
I agree about the bubble effect. I feel it, too, even though I don’t consider myself in a bubble. I truly am enjoying Lemmy and the conversations more than anything else even somewhat similar to it. The smallish nature of the community probably combined with the slightly elevated bar for joining means the riff raff isn’t here in large numbers yet.
Lemmy, today, honestly reminds me of Reddit 15 years ago.
Perhaps this is the bubble effect, but I have a high confidence level in the major third party devs being able to streamline the sign up process. It is already happening in some apps.
The stability problems are another story. I encourage people to go to the front page of their respective communities and look for donation links. Even $1/mo on Patreon can snowball into large sums as Lemmy.World shows.
I agree, but I’m also optimistic because the glitchiness, server performance, and user interface issues are all things that can be fixed in the future.
Agreed with the second part. I think the federated servers are a neat concept, but at the end of the day what made reddit easier was that everything was on one server. You create an account and that’s it, you can browse every subreddit.
I hope it’ll grow more, but rnow I think they should work on making the whole experience more seamless
I feel like there should be a button of “hey you want me to handle this for you and pick an instance” I managed to figure out the basics and liked the post office example that memmy uses where I can mail a letter to my fellow lemm.ee friends down the street but can also get mail and news from across the country. Helpful admins are also good. I’m not super duper tech literate but I figured it out.
Like I said reducing barriers to entry will be helpful because I didn’t come here till Apollo kicked the bucket
Just my opinion but that ease of use will come in time. The more the learning curve exists the more we will get the power users that made Reddit special and the more Lemmy will stay special.
I don’t want the Reddit of today on Lemmy. I want the Reddit 10 years ago when there was a fraction of the users on it.
We are doomed to ultimately have the same struggles that read it ended up with in terms of content and users but we can keep it held off as long as possible.
I disagree with you, yes, ease of use will come for power users, but in the end it’s the diversity of people interacting with the platform that creates communities with valuable content. And to attract more people the platform needs less friction at on-boarding.
Where we disagree is that I believe the level of knowledge needed to form that community is higher than you’re giving credit but time will tell! ;)
Yep, we’ll see!